PRESTOPUNDIT

The Supreme Court's judicial activists are cutting off the branch on which they sit. By rejecting the law and putting their personal opinions in its place, the justices invite the people to imitate them and disregard their decrees with the same willfulness they disregard the Constitution. If Anthony Kennedy isn't bound by the framers' words, why are the people bound by his?

The authority of Supreme Court justices derives from the authority of the Constitution: once they deny its authority, they deny their own. The Roper v. Simmons decision is a stunningly stark illustration of this despotism that masquerades as jurisprudence. Despotism is not an overwrought description here: we are dealing with a lawless court, judges who obey no law save their own will. Yes, they invoke a living Constitution, but that just means the real Constitution lies dead at their feet, having been trampled beneath a juggernaut of false progress.

The justices spoke of "evolving standards of decency," which means evolving standards of indecency. And they speak about these standards as if they are just reporting their existence rather than pushing them into existence through judicial decree. The judges are not neutral reporters of fact but agents of activism, full of elitist disdain at the American people for not changing the standards themselves. "Evolving standards of decency" in the world that the justices inhabit doesn't mean children aren't killed. It just means they have a better chance of surviving if they are guilty and dangerous .. Through some perverse inversion of values .. unborn children can be killed according to the [leftwing] elite's most crass utilitarian calculus .. while a 17-year-old menace is cosseted like a baby. The same judges who infantilize teen murderers encourage parents and schools to furnish teens with condoms, and should those condoms fail parents, according to judges, should let their teens .. decide on their own whether to apply evolving standards of decency to unwanted children growing within them .. Nor is the posture of casting teens as innocent waifs one the justices ever strike in censorship cases. Indeed, a teens- know- best attitude runs through much of the .. thinking of the Court .. [In effect] teens operate like adults in the evolved culture that the Court seeks to spread.

The Court's conveniently patronizing description of 17-year-olds in the Roper decision would have been news to Americans at the time of the Constitution's ratification: for them, many of whom didn't live to be 40, 17 was practically middle age .. [But the] Supreme Court has zero interest in the America of the founders .. [instead it] looks longingly to the Europe that the framers left [behind] .. What Anthony Kennedy calls cultural evolution looks more like regression -- a return to the tyrannies of Enlightenment Europe.